Anders Pederson died after donating a kidney to save his sister. According to the account provided by Joe Kiani, he developed severe pain and vomiting, his pain medication was changed, warning signs went unnoticed, and he later died after falling into a coma.
Kiani, founder and CEO of Masimo Corporation and founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, uses that case to argue that preventable medical harm remains one of the most urgent public health crises in America. He says research suggests medical errors contribute to roughly 250,000 deaths each year in the United States, and that globally the toll may reach 3 million deaths annually.
His central claim is sharper: if every hospital implemented all of the evidence-based practices researchers and clinicians have already identified and validated, the death toll could fall from approximately 200,000 a year to as few as 20,000. He says those protocols already exist and are posted on his foundation’s website for hospital administrators to use.
Kiani argues this is not a matter of breakthrough science or new drugs. It is, in his words, a quantifiable and achievable outcome that the system is choosing not to pursue. He points back to the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report 'To Err Is Human', which estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans were dying each year from preventable medical errors.
He also cites an OIG report from 2011 showing 200,000 patients a year were dying. In his telling, the warning has been on the wall for 25 years, while families continue paying the price.
The comparison he draws with aviation is revealing. Airlines changed because crashes were visible, pilots shared the risk, and passengers could choose not to fly. Hospitals, by contrast, face none of those market pressures. Patients often have no choice but to seek care, and the people inside the system do not bear the consequences of failure in the same direct way.
That is the real lesson for anyone who believes in free enterprise and hard accountability. When institutions are insulated from the consequences of failure, they move slowly, even when the fix is sitting on the shelf. In Kiani’s view, the problem is not the absence of tools. It is a system that has not built the incentives to use them.
He says that when his team brought 20 evidence-based practices into Children’s Hospital of Orange County, the result was zero preventable deaths for more than six years straight, along with dramatically reduced serious harms. If that example holds up, the case for reform is even simpler: better outcomes are possible when leadership treats patient safety as a nonnegotiable standard instead of a slogan.
